Measure Mob

Why Your Next Marketing Hire Needs To Be a Hybrid and Four Factors to Help You Find Them

Keith — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:33:14 +0000

Today I had a friend inquire about hiring a marketing professional with deep knowledge and skill sets using social media. The post immediately spurred two questions in my mind. They were….

1. If I had to build a great digitally savvy social media marketer what would the components look like? I actually hesitate a bit here using the term social as that should really be a part of a bigger whole but for the purposes of this article lets focus on social media specific skills.

2. Why are decision makers always adding “Social Media Skills” as a caveat in their marketing position listings?

We’ll cover question number one today and number two after the new year. This list is not meant to be comprehensive as much as it is meant to identify the things that set professionals apart. It will also highlight those items that are so often overlooked by employers when vetting potential candidates.

In My Experience

For question number one it is actually a bit funny in that I have been around this space for so long that it is more faces that come to mind than anything. There are very few people in this digital and social space that recognize the opportunity, understand the community and network ethics and can leverage the technologies in a way that pays ROI. The others just hop from job to job and ask a lot of the same questions. For those of you who are seeking positions in this ever growing space I’ll give you a recommendation that Chris Brogan gave me many years ago when I asked him how to break in. He told me that the best way to get in was to work with a charity and offer my services and expertise to help build credibility and experience. I did that and still do to this day. I love giving back!

Component Number One – Writing

This sounds like a simple skill and one that most people need but if you are hiring someone to be the face of your organization in the digital and social media space they’d better be able to write. How about a test? Hiring a social media pro for the first time? Get some samples. Ask him or her to write a press release, a blog post and a short form teaser that would get posted to something like Facebook or Twitter. Ask your candidate to write a response plan for someone who might be complaining about your business on their blog or social media homepage. These are things that will highlight inconsistencies and quickly reveal inadequacies. Hopefully your candidates pass with flying colors. If they do move on to….

Component Number Two – Monitoring

I can’t tell you how many times (hundreds) supposed social media gurus would hit me up with questions on and recommendations for tools to monitor social channels immediately following their hire. Now, I am not talking about collaborative recommendations but rather “How, What and Why” questions regarding monitoring. When I get these questions from a director of digital or Social media director then I start wondering how they were hired in the first place. I’m more than happy to recommend products or make feature comparisons but unfortunately I cannot write your listening and monitoring strategy. Darn, this post is sounding selfish and I don’t mean it to. However, as an employer ask your potential candidates what kind of monitoring tools they have used in the past and maybe even ask them do demonstrate a simple social search for your brand. Even better, locate an opportunity for your brand to engage with the community.

Component Number Three – Measurement

I bet one in every hundred self proclaimed social media expert knows how to deploy an instance of Google Analytics to a blog. It is probably less that understand how to interpret the data to inform any kind of decision making. If you are in the digital space and you have zero capabilities in analytics I’d highly recommend at minimum taking the Google Analytics IQ certification. Now maybe your digital marketing person will have people that will handle the analytics implementation and interpretation but in my experience these situations are rare. The biggest reason for the short half life of a social media professional is because they have no clue how to measure results and inform or impact the business through data. The boss might think he or she is looking for someone specifically to send tweets or Facebook updates but it wont be long before they are asking how this activity is impacting the business.

Sidebar: I also think that in many cases monitoring and measurement are clumped together. This should NEVER be the case. Measurement skills do not include counting mentions and number of followers unless these metrics are in some way impacting the business bottom line.

Component Number Four – The Human Droid

Ok, so you aren’t really looking for a droid. Well, maybe you are…who knows. The point here is that any marketing person must be half human (real person/outgoing) and half technologist (droid/tech guru). These people are hard to find. Would you typically send your tech team out for a physical event? Usually not. There are the rare few but in my experience the guys behind the computer screens making everything work are not usually filling roles in the PR department. However, in this new age of marketing you need a person whom at the very least understands what an API is while at the same time can shake hands at a trade show or company event. This person needs to understand the inner workings (Insights, Ad’s, API, User Permissions) and rules of a network like Facebook as much as they understand how to post an update to the page. These are the things that I see constantly overlooked. Has your candidate ever administered a company Facebook page? Can they report on insights? Can they even find the page insights? Can they leverage possible ad opportunities? These factors in my opinion are much more important than having the ability to post an update or a response.

What do you look for when hiring a digital media professional? I hope this list gives potential employers as well as potential candidates some areas to focus on and think about in the new year. The industry will mature faster when employers know what to look for and employees know what to train for.

Acquisition Through Recognition – Your Most Important and Most Ignored Social Media Tactic

Keith — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:48:52 +0000

A few years ago I worked with a highly visited tourist destination consulting with them on digital and social media strategies. As a consultant at the time I remember that the primary stakeholders within the organization were always worried about and focused on acquisition of followers in the social space. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter or Pintrest they wanted the primary metric to be be the growth of these networks. Now, as a consultant I spoke to them quite a bit about being able to track and prove the effectiveness of these network building activities but to be honest they seemed to have blinders on when it came to understanding what was working and what was not. This post is not meant to sound like a digital strategist complaining about an old client but rather one that wants to highlight what in most cases should be your most important tactic in the social space and that can be summed up in one word: RECOGNITION.

The facility that I was consulting with had hundreds of mentions per day on Twitter. People created YouTube videos of their displays and events. Visitors posted photos to Flickr and tagged the facility. My plan was to create a a process where by RECOGNITION would be their primary method for ACQUIRING new followers and improving awareness across the US.

The Big Idea

My big idea was to create an actual group. We were going to call it The (Facility Name) Media Mavens or something like that. Our strategy would be to reach out to these people that were frequent sharers (Twitterers, Facebookers, Pinners & Bloggers) of facility content and offer them the ability to come to the facility twice a year to get a behind the scenes view, take photos, shoot video and interview the caretakers of this facility. In my opinion, maybe I’m biased, but I believed this strategy to be ingenious.

Embrace those who love you and you will build a real community. Push your message in hopes that someone will see it or give a crap about it and you’re doomed to fail.

How many:
Companies
Agencies
Tourist Facilities
Sporting Goods Companies
Brick and Mortars
Blogs
……………….you name it. Give amazing service, have people who love them and share their work only to ignore them in hopes of finding that one new visitor. The one new customer, or the new follower? As a freshman in High School I learned the metric that it costs one dollar to keep a customer and 10 dollars to find one. That metric should get extended to the social media space as well!!! Recognise those who are recognising and showing passion for what you do or offer. Enlist these people to help spread the story. Get people involved in a way that adds value to their life. Give people a way to give back that is fun and rewarding. Its NOT that difficult. All this requires is some out-of-the-box thinking. Get out of the AQUISITION mindset and into the RECOGNITION mind set and watch your communities grow.

Failing to recognize is like planting a garden and omitting the fertilizer and water.

Managing Expectations for Overflowing Business Success

Keith — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:47:43 +0000

I am making a prediction that the economy is absolutely pulling out of any recession and moving into a state of overflowing wealth and prosperity. How do I know that? Am I reading into the stock reports? No. Am I sitting on shareholder reporting calls? No. Am I an economic analyst in my spare time? No, no and no. My crystal ball in using the powers of observation. As the Director of Marketing for Carbonview Research I have the pleasure to work with suppliers, vendors and consultants of many types. I also have the ability to observe the way staff work with their partners and solutions groups. What i find absolutely amazing is that it is an absolute rarity that expectations are ever managed! If you ask a vendor to help with a new project they might get back and they might not. They might tell you they’ll have a proposal the next morning when your really lucky to see it by the next week! When engaging with a supplier they may promise a solutions update for the next morning and of course when you look for your update it’s not there. Oh! Well there must at least be a simple one line email explaining why and when they plan to implement right? Nope. In fact, its likely your outreach email to them gets one of those OUT OF OFFICE replies. Well, that makes it ok then. They had off today. No need to manage my expectations.

Is this article sounding a bit skewed to the negative? Ok, well then let me give you three tips to how and why you will make more money managing expectations.

Beat Expectations and Reap Rewards

Recently, I went to a larger sporting goods store to buy some sneakers. I’ve got some issues with flat feet and finding anyone more knowledgeable than I am about the issue (been dealing with this for 38 years) is rare. In fact I would say that my expectation was not really to expect anything. What i found was a person (young guy – probably high school) who was super passionate about fitting people properly. This kid knew his shit! I got a great pair of sneakers, sent a Facebook post about it and told just about everyone in my Triathlon club.

Keep the Ball in your Court and do More Repeat Business

Are you a consultant? Have you worked with consultants? I was a consultant for many years and the biggest thing I did that made my clients happy was keeping the ball in my court as much as humanly possible. You’ve had that vendor right? They like to put the ball back in your court all the time asking you to fill out a new form, get you a logo or whatever the heck it might be. That way they can always blame any hold-up’s on you? Work with me and after every communication I’ll ask you what you need from me. I shouldn’t have to put the ball back in the court for you. Pick the damn thing up and slam it home! I’ll refer the heck out of you for it!

Simply Manage Expectations Truthfully

Want to keep clients happy? Manage their expectations, don’t lie and under-communicate. When you tell me you’ll send me an email tomorrow, do it. If you’re not by a computer then call me, text me, tweet me. I don’t care. See I am the type of person that will actually go to work for you if you do a good job. I’ll see to it that you get every referral that passes my desk. I’ll invite you on a podcast to help spread the word. Whatever! Use common sense here. Drop the ball once – shame on you. Drop the ball twice – Shame on me. Drop the ball three times and you’ll be looking for a new gig.

What else is more important than managing expectations?????

Measure Mobcast ~ Scaling Social Media. Should You?

Keith — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 16:59:50 +0000

Recently, our friend Mitch Joel wrote an article about scaling social. Mitch brings up a bevy of issues and certainly created a great discussion that has been going on for a long time and will certainly go on for years to come. Today, the Measure Mob talks about some of the issues in scaling social and asks the question, “Should you?”

Enjoy the show and please let us know your take!

Show RSS Feed
Direct Download Link

Contributors today:
Jason Thompson (@usuJson)
Olivier Blanchard (@TheBrandBuilder)
Keith Burtis (@KeithBurtis)

Chris Penn Redefines the Meaning of Value for Marketers and Communicators

Keith — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 15:46:42 +0000

Ninja Chop by CC Chapman

I had a podcast discussion yesterday with Mark Lewis of the Inferno agency out of Silicon Valley and mentioned what I like to call the ‘98/2’. Its simply a ratio of good versus garbage content. 98% is garbage and 2% is great. Now this is by no means a scientific measurement but comes from my years on the web as a content creator and observer.

Today, I would like to tell you about someone that fits squarely into the upper two percent and that is Christopher S. Penn. If you’ve not heard of him that is fine but if your not following everything he does after reading this article then it is certainly your loss.

The Real Meaning of Value

You hear the word value tossed around like a beach ball among marketers these days. ‘We need to add value’, said in a whiny snarky voice. Talk about buzzwords that have lost their meaning, value is it. Chris redefines the meaning of value and it runs like a string through every social post and piece of content he creates. Chris, while not an idle chatter in places like Twitter will re-post others content worth reading and a bit of his own. If he’s read it, I want to have read it too!

Trans-Media

Chris is one of the original founders of Podcamp with Chris Brogan, Whitney Hoffman, CC Chapman and others. This was the original unconference and really gave independent content creators a voice. Chris has been podcasting with John Wall for many years on a podcast called Marketing Over Coffee. Listen to that with a pen in your hand as they crank out gold nugget after gold nugget in the usual time span of 15-20 minutes. In addition to his podcast you will see Chris using his drawing skills, video skills and writing very frequently in his marketing efforts as the Director of Inbound Marketing at WhatCounts.

Multi-Channel Guerilla

Chris is an amazing Guerilla marketer. He’s built a loyal, high value following across multiple channels and never disappoints. Some of the channels I’ve observed masterful use in:

- Twitter
- Facebook
- E-Books
- Audio Podcasting
- Video Podcasting
- PDF Marketing that crosses from his web domains through to Amazon and mobile devices.

Poke around a bit and you’ll learn a lot from his content as well as his technique. I know Chris would appreciate that as it is the highest form of respect.

Analytics

Yea, all of this stuff is great. Maybe you can make content across multiple channels and be the best content aggregator you can be but what does it all mean. Chris will even help you with that. Following his personal blog is always loaded with great tips and tricks for measuring your marketing activities. He’s spoken about it at Blog World, Social Fresh and probably a hundred other conferences I don’t even know about! Observe and learn.

Transparency

To be very transparent this post was not provoked in any way. Chris hasn’t asked and to be honest I hope it has done him some justice (Just scratching the surface here). The post is simply to share with you Chris’ work and to show my appreciation to him for all of the hard work he puts in. Who brings value to your world? Lets line up your favorites in the comments!!!

…..oh, did I mention Chris codes as well and they call him Ninja?

Announcing a New Gig and a bit of Contest Fun!

Keith — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:36:14 +0000

You know, life very rarely takes you down an expected linear path. Fact is, I don’t know anyone who’s ever not deviated from their planned path in life. I thought I was going to be a marine biologist. Kind of like web optimization and metrics right? We asses the data and make decisions based on that data to optimize to the best of our ability. Well, I have made a change on the career front and I am very excited to announce that I have taken on a new role at Carbonview Research as Director, Marketing & Communications.

Carbonview is a full service Market Research firm that prides itself on the talent of the employees to provide the best services for clients. This is really what drew me into Carbonview. Rich Ratcliff, President and my new boss believes fully in hiring the most passionate people and if you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you know I’m a passionate person.

OK, so how can this effect you? How can I reach out to you the readers in thanking you for your support? Simple, lets have a fun contest! At Carbonview we have a product called Rapid Fire. It’s a same day market research solution. Maybe you need survey data to combine with your quantitative web analytics data to paint the right picture for your client. Maybe you are an agency that needs to quickly validate a concept for a new creative campaign. The needs for this type of data are short of endless and I’d like to give someone a voucher for a free Rapid Fire same day research study.

Yea, so, you’re already thinking, “What’s the catch? This guy is going to make us stand on our head, rubbing our tummy while eating an ice cream cone and post the photo to Facebook right?” Nope. It’s simple. Leave me a short comment in the blog post here (below) and send out a tweet with a link to the contest (Hashtag #RapidFire) and you’re in. Maybe you could share in your comment why market research is important to you or your firm. That would be great! Next Friday, I’ll announce the winner on the Carbonview Blog. Simple, easy, fun, right? Good luck!

Social TV – Boon or Bust?

Keith — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:37:26 +0000

Psychologists say that people will do more to avoid pain than they will to pursue pleasure. I’ve also read that in order for that same person to want to engage in that same activity that the pleasure must be increased to a point of which they believe has masked the pain or made them forget about the pain all together.

So what the heck am I talking about? Television of course. Now, I’m not a huge TV watcher, at least not in the traditional sense. Just recently I decided to watch X-Files on Hulu; all nine seasons. What a great experience. No commercials and I watched these episodes for months. Hulu makes their money on me because I pay for Hulu plus. In my opinion its a bit like paying for a premium channel like HBO.

I would have to call this experience pain free viewing. The $8.00 a month (pain) that I pay for awesome commercial free (pleasure) viewing is well worth it. But is it? I’ve now watched all the X-Files episodes (Sniffle) and I see that none of the other programming is commercial free (pain) and I’m still paying for the premium solution (pain). Now that I’ve completed X-Files I think I will cancel my premium subscription. The pain threshold of having to watch commercials is much higher than recording something on my DVR and fast forwarding through them.

So that’s my experience. How about you? Do you pay for a service like Hulu Plus? How about this new wave of social TV? I saw a friend check-in to one of his favorite shows the other night using Get Glue. Nearly every show has embraced real-time conversation by applying a trackable hashtag to their shows. Have you found yourself enjoying shows more in real-time because of this type of social integration? I am frankly skeptical. Books like Social TV by Mike Proulx and Stacey Shepatin talk about how social is dramatically helping live TV. For me, and no offense, but if I’m going to veg out on a favorite show I don’t really want to chat with everyone on Twitter about it. Now maybe that’s because I work on my computer all day but I still remain skeptical.

Shoot me a comment below. Are you using social TV apps or engaging in the live conversations? Has this increased your pleasure of watching live TV? I’d love to know.

Do you treat customers differently online? Why?

Keith — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:16:33 +0000

Riddle me this. What is the difference between a customer inquiring via social media channels and a customer asking a sales associate a question in a brick-and-mortar store?

I mean no disrespect here but I am so surprised with the number of companies/people/organizations that are still struggling with this question. Just this morning I saw tweets saying, “Corporate Social Media : Risky Business” and “Our company is trying to figure out how to tackle a real life social media customer”, Let me see if I can help clear this up a bit.

Social Media Pro’s and Con’s:

Pro: Activity in social media channels lasts forever and can be seen by more than just the single person you are interacting with.

Con: Activity in social media channels lasts forever and can be seen by more than just the single person you are interacting with.

Get it? You can stand firmly on either side of the fence if you want but I prefer to straddle this line. In a retail brick and mortar setting there is a high probability you are hiring teenagers to represent your brand to thousands or even millions of customers depending on the scale of your business. How many of these just collecting a check, couldn’t give a crap about your brand strategy, teenagers have you given media training to? Probably none. How many of these just collecting a check, couldn’t give a crap about your brand strategy, teenagers have you slapped a name tag on with maybe some rudimentary training and told to go sell some shoes? Probably most!

People! Wake Up! Your customers are on line. Their computers are not on line. These people on Twitter, Facebook, Pintrest and others……. YEA! Real humans. What would you do if you found your just collecting a check, couldn’t give a crap about your brand strategy, teenager brick and mortar employee ignoring a customer asking a question? You’d probably write them up or maybe even fire them if you saw this action repeated time over time.

Answer to the riddle: There is NO difference between a customer inquiring via social media and one asking a question in a brick and mortar store.

Both customers have the exact same goal; to get the information they need to make an informed decision. So if you, the CEO, the CMO, the CFO don’t begin embracing these customers online YOU SHOULD BE FIRED! It’s that simple!

Yea, there are challenges online but these certainly can be overcome with a well thought out strategy and some simple training. Seriously, stop ignoring people just because they are online. There is no excuse for it.

Optimizing the Share Button

Keith — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:41:38 +0000

Recently there has been a rash of new ways to ask your visitors to share your content out to social media sites. The fact is however that not all social media sites drive the same types of traffic. I decided to create a single slide that would help you ask the right questions when it comes to adding and removing share buttons from the content on your website or blog.

It is SUPER important that the share data is integrated with the the rest of your site analytics and specifically with segmented traffic reports coming out of social media channels. In the slide below you see that the Stumble Upon gets a lot of traction. That button may get a lot of attention and may even drive a lot of return traffic but what is the quality of that traffic? Are they bouncing? Consuming more content? Converting? Maybe removing the Stumble Upon button will increase the shares to LinkedIn where the quality of the traffic returning is much higher. Taken on their face the numbers in those boxes are purely high level data and not very actionable. Integration is essential to better understand how these social share buttons are effecting your website as a whole.

Click to Enlarge

Would love any feedback you have. What are your challenges when measuring social media or specific social media implementations?

Job Quitting on the Rise. What Does That Mean?

Keith — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:04:46 +0000

Today, I was watching the #measure hashtag on Twitter and saw this post from Jason Burby:

The link takes you to a post on the Freakonomics website questioning whether more people quitting their jobs was a good thing or not. I’ll let you look at the data and make that decision for yourself. What I would like to do is offer a theory that says these numbers have less to do with the US economy and more to do with the American mindset.

Separation Between Driven and……. Not So Much

It’s the holiday time of the year. This is my favorite opportunity to try and explain to my family what social media and web analytics is. Yea right. Every year someone new is at the holiday dinner table asking me what I do and I tell them I work on the internet to keep it simple. usually what ensues is this discussion about how the internet ruins jobs, isn’t a good source for information, where people can be stalkers and all that fun stuff. See why I try to avoid it? What’s the point you ask and how does this relate to the subject at hand?

Simple. The people that I tend to have holiday discussion with can be a bit stuck in 2008. Yea, I said 2008 not 1979. Things have changed really fast. The internet and technologies have closed antiquated doors and opened up new channels for communication, development, and employment. Thusly the global economy has changed.

I was that guy 7 years ago. I was the guy who’s job was fairly antiquated and saw very little upside. I was lucky to have been engaged in digital for as long as I can remember. My father and I were developing games on the Atari 400 in 1978. I’d been mucking around with data since high school and I was pretty tuned into the very early online networking scene. I took this as a cue to pursue my passions and get more involved in the online space. After years of hard work and study I am now the Director, Social Media Solutions for Keystone Solutions. To me, this is a success story. I am super happy and I get to play at that edge of development all the time.

This isn’t about me though! If you are reading this there is a very good chance you’ve had a similar path to myself. I am not unique. Not Unique, but i do believe I am not the majority either. We all know of the recent collapse in the economy. We are all questioning the government bailouts and the companies that took that bailout money. There is a much better chance that many of those Wall Street money managers should be in jail rather than receiving reward money. And then again, maybe not, I don’t know. I honestly choose not to focus on it. I’m not waking up every morning flicking on the news and swearing at the local and national politicians. I’m not asking how we can change society. What I am asking is, “How can I move forward?”, “How can I have impact in my family and our company?” Call me ignorant but i don’t give a crap what is on the news everyday. I am, however, in the minority.

Maybe I’ve taken the long route to get to my point but I believe that the separation between those looking out for opportunity and furthering themselves through study and drive is widening from those that are not. My wife has a friend who’s husband has been out of work for three years and I know for fact he’s doing NOTHING to get involved in the situation beyond sending out a couple resume’s every week. he’s not reading the tea leaves. He wants to take what he knows and apply it. I told him that there are immense opportunities in his area if he got engaged with that community online and he set up a linked in account that he never updates.

Humans take the path to least resistance and people are not holding themselves accountable. They want to blame the government, they want to blame the job market, they want to have something to bitch about or they don’t feel complete.

Ever see a sports team that loses year after year after year? Same Thing! It’s easier to do the same things over and over than it is to adapt and change. My daughter is 20 years old and in college. I tell her all the time that by the time she gets out her industry will have changed 180 degrees. You simply have to embrace change. This goes against the human spirit to flock and get comfortable but I really believe that the people quitting their jobs right now are those embracing change and opportunity.

The web analytics space is in DIRE need for qualified talent. The agencies are fighting over motivated talent! Want to change your situation? Go ahead and reach out to me. I’ll do what I can to point you in the right direction. Get on the bus that is moving forward and stop worrying about media propaganda. You get what you focus on!

Check out this video from Keystone Solutions, we’re looking for people!